James Oakley's blog

The day before yesterday, version 3.3 of Mandelbrot Explorer was released. Here's what it looks like:

There are a number of new features, and they are listed in full on the version history page. I shall draw attention to the 3 main ones.

The release of the first Beta for forthcoming version 3.3 includes a major change. Machine with multiple processors, or with multi-core processors, are now fully supported. This means that such machines can speed up their calculations by a factor of 2, 4 or even 6. Current trends suggest that future computers will have more processing cores, as opposed to faster processors, so this increase in speed will be even more significant in the future.

We, at Mandelbrot Explorer, were very sad to hear of the recent death of Benoit Mandelbrot. Mandelbrot was a mathematician who did much to research the properties of fractals and of fractal geometry. It is a fitting honour to his work that the Mandelbrot Set was named after him. Benoit Mandelbrot died on Thursday (14th October 2010) because of pancreatic cancer. His work did much to introduce many people to a branch of mathematics, who would otherwise have had no interest in maths; the news of his passing is sad news indeed.

Mandelbrot Explorer version 3.2 is now available for download

New features in this latest release include:

Version 3.2 of Mandelbrot Explorer will be released at the end of this month. It will include some exciting new features, which you can read about on the Version History page of this website.

The first beta release of the forthcoming version 3.2 sees a number of new features. These are listed on the Version History page.

Yesterday, Mandelbrot Explorer version 3.1 was released; you can download it from the download page.

New features include random colour schemes and smoothed fractals. Bug fixes include 64-bit compatibility and a previous error on some computers that a DLL file was missing.

Slightly earlier than planned, I have released the first beta of version 3.1 of Mandelbrot Explorer.

The reason for the accelerated release is that version 3.0 contained a bug that means it will not run on 64-bit (or x64) operating systems. If you try to run 3.0 on a 64-bit system, you get the following error:

An error has occurred from which Mandelbrot Explorer will not be able to recover. An attempt was made to load a program with an incorrect format. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x8007000B)

Mandelbrot Explorer 3.0 was released today, the first version in over 4 years. This new version features a brand new fractal rendering engine that makes the application easier to use and more intuitive. Colour schemes are now layer-based, allowing more advanced editing of colour schemes. These two major under-the-hood developments have opened up many new features, and there will be more in future releases.

To read the full list of developments, please consult the What's New page.

I know I only just released Beta 1, but there is a more up to date Beta now out, namely Beta 2. The download is available from http://www.mandel.org.uk/beta.